San Diego Mayor - potable reuse is divisive, expensive and unnecessary - desalination and water imports are better options ...

Excerpt from the San Diego Union-Tribune:

City to announce largest sale of reclaimed water

1 June 2007

San Diego city officials will announce the largest sale of recycled water in county history today.

The buyer is the Otay Water District, which has agreed to purchase about 6 million gallons of reclaimed – or partially purified – water each day for irrigating golf courses, parks and other areas in eastern Chula Vista. The water will come from San Diego's two reclamation plants.

The Otay Water District is to buy a large amount of water from the city of San Diego. But even with this major deal, the reclamation facilities will operate at only about one-third of their combined capacity. The city will continue to pump tens of millions of gallons of partially treated wastewater into the ocean daily instead of recycling them for sale.

Few businesses are willing to buy reclaimed water, partly because they don't want to pay for the installation of specialized plastic piping. It's expensive to put in the purple pipes in developed areas – so expensive that San Diego has stopped doing such work for the time being.

Meanwhile, Mayor Jerry Sanders has rejected the politically volatile idea of super-purifying the wastewater so it can be used as drinking water.

The concept, known as reservoir augmentation, has been espoused by several City Council members, a city-sponsored citizens' panel, a coalition of water districts throughout the county, many environmentalists and the county grand jury.

“The city appears to lack the vision to take actions to protect citizens from potential water shortages,” the grand jury wrote in a mid-May review of San Diego's water and wastewater programs.

The report said San Diego won't meet its self-declared goal of selling 50 percent of the recycled water that it can produce by 2010. It also noted that reservoir augmentation would help reduce the city's huge reliance on non-local sources of water.

San Diego imports about 85 percent of its water, and overall water demand is expected to rise 25 percent by 2030.

“The city has not acknowledged that the region is suffering from a long-term drought which may prove to be permanent,” the grand jury wrote.

San Diego is seeking more buyers of reclaimed water but doesn't have much money to expand the program, said Marsi Steirer, a top official for the city's water department.

Last year, San Diego completed a roughly $1 million study of water-reuse options. Reservoir augmentation was a central recommendation in that analysis. The concept involves putting super-purified water into the city's San Vicente Reservoir near Lakeside. There, it would mix with river water and be treated again before being piped throughout the city.

Critics of the proposal cite various public-health concerns, summarized in their nickname for the plan: “toilet to tap.”

Sanders doesn't dispute the science behind reservoir augmentation, but he insists that such projects are divisive, expensive and unnecessary. He points to desalination and importation of water as better options.

While debate continues over reservoir augmentation, the Otay Water District's new purchase of reclaimed water is being touted as a win-win situation.

San Diego will receive an estimated $2 million a year from Otay, while the district will be able to significantly lower its reliance on imported water.

“Every (gallon) that we recycle is a (gallon) of potable imported water that we won't put in the landscape,” said Otay manager Mark Watton.

The district began planning its $43 million piping and storage network for reclaimed water in the early 1990s, Watton said. The project started well before Otay officials were sure where their reclaimed water would come from.

“We knew that we were a little ahead putting in the purple pipe . . . but we also knew that you could never go in and retrofit a neighborhood. You had to have the pipes in” while the communities were being developed, Watton said.

Nowadays, drought conditions affecting the Colorado River and minimal snowpacks in Northern California make Otay's investment look smart. San Diego County gets most of its water from these two sources.

Using reclaimed water makes parks and other open spaces “essentially drought-proof,” Watton said.

See - San Diego - there are better options.